TY - GEN
T1 - Towards next generation health data exploration
T2 - 46th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2013
AU - McCusker, James P.
AU - McGuinness, Deborah L.
AU - Lee, Jeongmin
AU - Thomas, Chavon
AU - Courtney, Paul
AU - Tatalovich, Zaria
AU - Contractor, Noshir
AU - Morgan, Glen
AU - Shaikh, Abdul
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Increasingly, experts and interested laypeople are turning to the explosion of online data to form and explore hypotheses about relationships between public health intervention strategies and their possible impacts. We have engaged in a multi-year collaboration to use and design semantic techniques and tools to support the current and next generation of these explorations. We introduce a tool, qb.js, to enable access to multidimensional statistical data in ways that allow non-specialists to explore and create specific visualizations of that data. We focus on explorations of health data - in particular aimed at helping to support the formation and analysis of hypotheses about public health intervention strategies and their correlation with health-related behavior changes. We used qb.js to formulate and explore the hypothesis that youth tobacco access laws have consistent, measurable impacts on the rate of change in cigarette smoking among high school students over time. While focused in this instance on one particular intervention strategy (i.e., limiting youth access to tobacco), this analytics platform may be used for a wide range of correlational analyses. To address this hypothesis, we converted population science data on tobacco-related policy and behavior from ImpacTeen to a Resource Description framework (RDF) representation that was annotated with the RDF Data Cube vocabulary. A Semantic Data Dictionary enabled mapping between the original datasets and the RDF representation. This allowed for the creation and publication of data visualizations using qb.js. The RDF Data Cube representation made it possible to discover a significant downward effect from the introduction of nine youth tobacco access laws on the rate of change in smoking prevalence among high school-aged youth.
AB - Increasingly, experts and interested laypeople are turning to the explosion of online data to form and explore hypotheses about relationships between public health intervention strategies and their possible impacts. We have engaged in a multi-year collaboration to use and design semantic techniques and tools to support the current and next generation of these explorations. We introduce a tool, qb.js, to enable access to multidimensional statistical data in ways that allow non-specialists to explore and create specific visualizations of that data. We focus on explorations of health data - in particular aimed at helping to support the formation and analysis of hypotheses about public health intervention strategies and their correlation with health-related behavior changes. We used qb.js to formulate and explore the hypothesis that youth tobacco access laws have consistent, measurable impacts on the rate of change in cigarette smoking among high school students over time. While focused in this instance on one particular intervention strategy (i.e., limiting youth access to tobacco), this analytics platform may be used for a wide range of correlational analyses. To address this hypothesis, we converted population science data on tobacco-related policy and behavior from ImpacTeen to a Resource Description framework (RDF) representation that was annotated with the RDF Data Cube vocabulary. A Semantic Data Dictionary enabled mapping between the original datasets and the RDF representation. This allowed for the creation and publication of data visualizations using qb.js. The RDF Data Cube representation made it possible to discover a significant downward effect from the introduction of nine youth tobacco access laws on the rate of change in smoking prevalence among high school-aged youth.
KW - Linked data
KW - Public health
KW - Smoking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84875499684&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84875499684&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/HICSS.2013.567
DO - 10.1109/HICSS.2013.567
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84875499684
SN - 9780769548920
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
SP - 2725
EP - 2732
BT - Proceedings of the 46th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2013
Y2 - 7 January 2013 through 10 January 2013
ER -
